Our holdings include hundreds of glass and film negatives/transparencies that we've scanned ourselves; in addition, many other photos on this site were extracted from reference images (high-resolution tiffs) in the Library of Congress research archive. (To query the database click here.) They are adjusted, restored and reworked by your webmaster in accordance with his aesthetic sensibilities before being downsized and turned into the jpegs you see here. All of these images (including "derivative works") are protected by copyright laws of the United States and other jurisdictions and may not be sold, reproduced or otherwise used for commercial purposes without permission.

I was surprised that this one wasn't sooner than 1920, because of the fact that the bathing suits still looked like 10-15 years earlier while, just a couple years later, they were wearing the wool sleeveless suits that exposed most of the thigh. I wonder if it was regional, in part, that the skimpier suits started farther south and worked their way farther north. A few of them in this photo have shorter sleeves, but most still look like they are wearing the lighter corsettes under them. The wool suits, scratchy as they sound, would have been quite liberating over all the layers and layers. I just had another thought, though. When they got wet, they would have made the girl smell like a wet sheep!

Shorpy.com | History in HD is a vintage photo archive featuring thousands of high-definition images from the 1850s to 1960s. (Available as fine-art prints from the Shorpy Archive.) The site is named after Shorpy Higginbotham, a teenage coal miner who lived 100 years ago.